HAROUN AND THE SEA OF STORIES: Dramatic fable. Adapted by Dominique Serrand and Luan Schooler from the book by Salman Rushdie and the play by Tim Supple and David Tushingham. Directed by Serrand. (Through Jan. 7. At the Berkeley Repertory Theatre's Roda Theatre, 2015 Addison St., Berkeley. 90 minutes. Tickets $16-$54. Call (510) 647-2949 or visit www.berkeleyrep.org).

Salman Rushdie was there, seated in the middle of the audience for Wednesday's opening of the Berkeley Repertory Theatre's adaptation of "Haroun and the Sea of Stories." Sadly, Rushdie's presence was less apparent in the work presented on the stage.

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There's plenty of performance magic in Dominique Serrand's production. There's visual splendor and imagination in the floating platforms, suspended moons and bright red catwalk of Serrand and Wil Leggett's set and inspired whimsy in the outlandishly colorful and imaginative costumes of Sonya Berlovitz. There are delightfully engaging performances by a very talented ensemble.

But what's missing is the elfin playfulness of Rushdie's most beguiling novel, not to mention a lot of the story. Serrand -- the Theatre de la Jeune Lune director who concocted the wondrous "Don Juan Giovanni" and "The Green Bird" for Berkeley Rep -- and dramaturge Luan Schooler have oversimplified and weighed down the fable in their adaptation of Tim Supple's and David Tushingham's original Royal National Theatre dramatization.

It's a problem of misplaced emphasis. Rushdie wrote "Haroun" 12 years ago for his 11-year-old son. He wrote it while having to live in hiding under tight security because of the death threat (or fatwa) pronounced against him by Iran's Ayatollah Khomeini as part of the infamous international effort to censor "The Satanic Verses." Consequently, the book is a strong defense of artistic freedom -- and the necessity of storytelling -- wrapped in a delightful "Oz"-"Alice in Wonderland"-like fantasy with a touching father-son relationship at its heart.

The father-son story is the catalyst. Haroun (an avid Nora El Samahy as a fetchingly boyish preadolescent) lives in "a city so ruinously sad that it had forgotten its name" that stands "by a sea full of glumfish, which were so miserable to eat that they made people belch with melancholy." His father, Rashid (masterfully played by Serrand), is a famous storyteller, called "the Ocean of Notions" or the "Shah of Blah."

Their home is an island of cheer in the sad city, enlivened by the sweet songs of Haroun's mother, Soraya (soprano Jennifer Baldwin Peden, trilling silvery snatches of arias). But when Soraya loses faith in Rashid's stories and runs off with a fantasy-hating neighbor (a smarmy Colman Domingo), Rashid suddenly loses his inspiration.

With his father's life in peril from a corrupt ruler (Jarion Monroe as a comically sinister Russian mafioso) who'd hired his services, Haroun travels to Earth's invisible second moon to restore Rashid's talent. There he discovers a plot to poison the Sea of Stories, source of all the stories ever told, and ends up engaged in a Tolkien-ish war against the forces of the fearsome lord of shadows Khattam-Shud (a hilariously evil Domingo), whose name is Hindustani for "end of story."

Most of Rushdie's compact fable takes place in the fantastical realm of Haroun's dream adventure, a world filled with sly puns and inventive characters and incidents in the tradition of Lewis Carroll or L. Frank Baum's "Oz" books. Most of Serrand and Schooler's adaptation seems to take place in the comparative real world, establishing Rashid's quandary and Haroun's quest.

It's brightly and humorously portrayed, with wonderfully exaggerated performances by Domingo, Monroe and Katie Kreisler (as an enormous, chortling neighbor). Serrand stages it as an imaginative confection with characters in elaborate European evening dress or lacy, encompassing veils emerging from trapdoors and pools of water against the bright blues and reds of Marcus Dilliard and Jennifer Setlow's lights. Russ Appleyard adds musical flourishes on a variety of instruments.

David Kelly's delightfully cockeyed Iff, the water genie, provides a nice segue to the fantasy world, as does Monroe's very funny, bird-jerky Butt, the mechanical hoopoe that transports Haroun there. But Serrand and his designers don't make the fantasy realm any more fantastical than the reality, except for a dramatic set change at the climax and Berlovitz's cleverly outlined hands for the shadow warrior Mudra (Jennifer Riker with Peden as the shadow).

More problematic is the extent to which Serrand and Schooler have synopsized this part of the story to fit the play's brief 90 minutes (without intermission). Rushdie's moon Kahani has been rendered featureless, so that we have little idea of the two cultures that become engaged in battle over the survival of stories.

Mudra and most of the other imaginative characters -- the resolute floating gardener, the ingenious page Blabbermouth (both deftly represented by Myla Balugay), the fatuous Prince Bolo (hilarious puppetry by Kelly), the plentimaw fishes (Riker and Kreisler), even Butt -- appear as little more than footnotes for those prescient enough to have already read the book. Too much of the story is told rather than depicted, with the result that its artistic-freedom theme becomes less a parable than an attractively illustrated lecture.

The idea, as Rushdie explained in an interview in Sunday's Datebook, is to anchor the fantasy and the moral in the emotional stakes of the father-son relationship. But we're familiar enough with that world already. The problem with this "Haroun" is that it spends too much time on the riverbank or in Kansas without ever getting to Wonderland or Oz.